The invention relates to a tennis racket with a handle, which preferably is wrapped with a grip strip.
A tennis racket, normally consisting of a frame, strings and handle, is normally gripped by the hand of a tennis player with a certain gripping force. For an optimal stroke position and stroke control a minimum gripping force on the handle is necessary. Almost all tennis players have difficulties in always keeping the gripping force high enough, especially in the instant immediately preceding the impact of a tennis ball on the strings, often the gripping force decreases for a short time out of a "startle" reaction, a point in time when the grip it has to be sufficiently high. By video recordings and other observation techniques, an effort is made to teach tennis players how, in a tennis game, to manage to always hold the tennis racket firmly enough, i.e., hold the handle of the tennis racket with sufficient gripping force. These methods are expensive and not very successful.
By itself a tennis racket is known (U.S. Pat. No. 4,027,879), in which metal parts are provided, which as a function of the gripping force shift and mechanically strike one another, if the gripping force is high enough. In practice, however, it has turned out that this form of a gripping force indication is not reliable and, consequently, does not lead to real training results. Actually, such a gripping force indication often is not heard or the gripping force changes so slowly, that nothing at all is heard, since the impact pulse of the metal parts which depends only on the rate of change of the gripping force, is too small.